News: architecture firm Snøhetta has concluded the first phase of a major overhaul of New York‘s Times Square, continuing the initiative started in 2009 to pedestrianise large sections of the popular tourist destination.
The $55 million reconstruction project is the largest redesign of the square in decades and encompasses the transformation of five public plazas between 42nd and 47th Streets, which will be entirely reconstructed to remove any traces that vehicular traffic once ran through the square along the Broadway.
Rendering by Snohetta and MIR
Snøhetta completed the redevelopment of the plaza between 42nd and 43rd Streets just in time for the New Year’s Eve celebrations. It features flattened-out curbs that create single-level surfaces for pedestrians, as well as new benches and paving surfaces.
Working alongside engineers Weidlinger Associates and landscape architect Mathews Nielsen, the architects plan to open a second plaza by the end of 2015 and complete the entire project the following year.
Rendering by Snohetta
This stretch of the Broadway was first closed to traffic in 2009 as part of an initiative by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg to provide additional space for more than 400,000 pedestrians who pass through Times Square every day. Since then the square has seen a 33 percent reduction in traffic-related injuries, as well a 180 percent increase in shop lets around the square.
“Since we first introduced temporary pedestrian plazas in Times Square, we have seen increased foot traffic and decreased traffic injuries – and businesses have seen more customers than ever,” said Bloomberg. “With more than 400,000 pedestrians passing through Times Square every day, the plazas have been good for New Yorkers, our visitors, and our businesses – and that’s why we’re making them permanent.”
Once complete, the restructuring will add 13,000 square-metres (140,000 square-feet) of new pedestrian space to Times Square. It will feature ten solid granite benches, as well as two-tone paving slabs with embedded metal discs, designed to reflect the neon glow from surrounding signs and billboards.
“With innovative designs and a little paint, we’ve shown you can change a street quickly with immediate benefits,” said transportation commissioner Sadik-Khan.
The new Pérez Art Museum Miami by Herzog & de Meuron, which opened last month, features clusters of columns covered with plants suspended from the building’s large overhanging roof.
Blanc explains that the Swiss architects approached him to create these vertical gardens after they successfully worked together on the CaixaForum arts centre in Madrid, completed in 2008.
“We had already covered a wall totally with plants in Madrid,” says Blanc. “Here, for the museum, they asked me: ‘Do you think it’s possible to have the plants on columns instead?’ I said: ‘Yes, of course.'”
Unlike a green wall, which faces in one direction, Blanc had to use different types of plants on each side of the hanging columns.
“For the outside surface, facing the sea, [the plants] have to face full sun, they have to face strong winds, sometimes salt and sometimes hurricanes,” he says. “The side facing the museum is very dark, so [I used] shade-loving plants.”
Blanc claims the key to creating a successful vertical garden is the diversity of species used.
“I use many, many different species,” he explains. “Here, in Miami, I used 80 different species. Sometimes, I use up to 400. When you have so many species, it looks much more natural.”
Vertical gardens are more than just aesthetically pleasing, Blanc goes on to claim.
“Because the roots are growing on the surface, [rather than into the ground], all of the micro-organisms associated with the roots are totally in contact with the air, [which is important] for de-pollution,” he says, “Also, you have benefits of insulation.”
He continues: “And, of course, the target it to use water collected from the roof. With a horizontal garden you lose a lot of water through percolation in the soil. You only have useful water when you have a vertical garden.”
Blanc believes that vertical gardens have become so popular because they provide an interesting and space-efficient way of introducing greenery into cities and claims he doesn’t mind that so many other people have taken on his idea.
“You use vertical space and usually it is empty space,” he says. “I think that is why they have been such a big success.” “Everybody in the world is doing vertical gardens. Of course, 20-25 years ago, I was the only one. But I am happy because with this idea I created a new vision of the interaction between human beings, the town and plants.”
The stem of this task lamp designed by Bao-Nghi Droste forms an exaggerated loop behind the conical shade (+ slideshow).
The Round lamp by Bao-Nghi Droste of Heidelberg, Germany, has a wide shallow shade mounted at a 45 degree angle on the end of the curving steel tube.
“The gently shaped steel tube could be described as the centrepiece of the lamp because on the one hand it pictures the flow of the current all the way up from the base to the light source within the shade, and on the other hand it acts as a function-providing element,” said Droste.
He explained that the loop “provides a handle-like geometry for easily moving the lamp”, which rotates on its base.
Where the stem connects to the back of the shade, small concentric circles radiate outwards over its surface and a small amount of light is allowed to escape at the join.
“Sharp edges concentrically surround the hole as rings imaging a sort of epicenter at which the light emits,” said the designer.
An acrylic defuser covers the light source and emits a wide beam of light suitable for bedside reading or working at a desk.
Architecture studio MAPA borrowed elements and colours typically used on colonial-style Chilean houses to create this bright red residence in a winemaking region near Santiago.
MAPA designed WA House for a single resident, who presented an image of a traditional Chilean home as the starting point for the design.
Typical elements in these colonial-style residences include a central courtyard and an outdoor corridor, so the architects added these to the design and arranged living spaces around them.
They also used red powder-coated metal siding to clad the exterior walls, as red was a popular colour used on this type of building.
Spaces inside the house are separated into three groups, following the client’s request for different spaces for solitude, entertaining friends and accommodating guests.
The main courtyard is positioned between the living room and the guest suite, offering views in two directions. To the west, it looks out over the Valley of Curacaví, while to the east it faces uphill towards the nearby vineyards.
The sheltered outdoor corridor stretches along the western side of the building. Floor-to-ceiling glazing connects it with the living and dining room, and a terrace at one end provides a scenic spot for dining outdoors.
Gabled walls at both ends of the building reveal a pitched roof that runs diagonally across the building, creating angular ceilings throughout the house.
“This operation directly affects the spatial organisation of the house, uniquely setting each area with an irregular relationship between skies and floors,” said the architects.
Wooden floors and ceilings run through the entire building. There’s also a glazed second courtyard that permits views between four different rooms.
This architectural work is located on the outskirts of Santiago in the Valley of Curacaví characteristic within the country for its great wines. The site chosen for the house corresponds to the southern slope of the valley and is oriented toward the northwest in the direction of the distant views framed by the hills and vineyards.
The commission was made by a single man who seeks both the solitude and friends company. As a starting point he brought in the image of a Chilean colonial-style house as a reference for his future home. Both conditions give way to solve the central problems in the project, which added to the site conditions guided the following decisions:
First, develop a program in three areas: private, common and guests, which allows temper the house according to the situation that has its owner, also giving autonomy to use the premises either.
Second, take two primary elements of the Chilean colonial architecture such as the courtyard and the exterior corridor to generate distances and circulations between the three areas mentioned above.
Third, align the views in east-west direction towards the longitudinal valley on one side reaching the containment of the hills and on the other hand the escape of the remoteness of the vineyards.
Fourth, within the game of the rectangular plan the ridge is modified as the midpoint and is situated on a diagonal to the central axis of the house. This operation directly affects the spatial organisation of the house setting uniquely each area with an irregular relationship between skies and floors, which is emphasised by the application of the wood sheathing on both surfaces.
The common use sector which contains living, dining and kitchen increases the maximum height emphasising the relationship with patios and views, avoiding the strong presence of western light by placing the eaves that shape the main corridor, which also constitutes the terraces of the house.
The doors were built on site and in the case of gateways that receive morning sun we added a wicket that acts as a safety enclosure window. All the house has wood floors has been treated naturally in all venues except the living room and hallways, which applies a dark finish. The siding was made in blood red metal, a colour widely used in Chilean colonial style houses.
Italian architect Andrea Dragoni has extended a cemetery in an ancient Italian town by adding rows of monumental travertine walls with public plazas and artworks slotted in between (+ slideshow).
Andrea Dragoni was tasked with adding a new tract to the historic Gubbio necropolis, which is located just outside the town at the base of Mount Ingino in the Apennines.
The towering stone walls are laid out in sequence, intended by the architect to reflect the linear arrangement of the old town and its surrounding landscape.
“The contrast between void and solid resumes the rhythms found in the medieval town of Gubbio,” Dragoni told Dezeen. “The voids in this composition, as in many of my projects, play a central role. They become architecture with a strong poetic and spiritual reaction.”
Four equally sized courtyards are positioned at intervals between the walls. Italian artists Sauro Cardinali and Nicola Renzi created large site-specific artworks to occupy each one, plus large square skylights were added to frame views up to the sky.
“These spaces were inspired by James Turrell’s Skyspaces and are designed to be enjoyable public areas, independent from the cemetery, offering an opportunity to pause and reflect,” said the architect.
“The sky thus framed opens the mind to the reign of the invisible, allowing sight and thought to abandon Mother Earth’s gravity and acquire a more aerial and spiritual dimension,” he added.
Walls and floors are made from travertine – a form of limestone typically used in Italian architecture – and contrast with the brick structures of the original complex that can be spotted through one of the central corridors.
“Travertine was used by the Etruscans for all the most important public buildings of the Renaissance,” said Dragoni. “It is a tribute to this tradition that I wanted to reinterpret the material to emphasise the gravity of the volumes of the cemetery and their strong abstraction.”
Photography is by Alessandra Chemollo, apart from where otherwise stated.
Read on for a project description from Andrea Dragoni:
Extension of Gubbio Cemetery
The enlargement of the Gubbio cemetery is the result of studies of a new model of public building. On the one hand, it has developed the latest phase of growth of the monumental cemetery in Gubbio, one of Italy’s most important medieval cities. On the other hand, it intends to redefine its meaning and centrality within the structure of the city.
The plan is in an urban structure consisting of linear stereometric blocks arranged in such a way as to reflect the rural layouts that characterise the surrounding landscape and the historic city.
This concept of urban settlement is emphasised by the inclusion of large square enclosures designed to be open spaces that provide the structure with spatial rhythm.
These spaces were inspired by James Turrell’s Skyspaces and are designed to be enjoyable public areas, independently from the cemetery, offering an opportunity to pause and reflect. These are cubic “squares of silence” having open ceilings that evoke windows open to the sky. The sky thus framed opens the mind to the reign of the invisible, allowing sight and thought to abandon Mother Earth’s gravity and acquire a more aerial and spiritual dimension.
Photograph by Massimo Marini
This relationship with the sky intends to define space that is also time, in such a way that you can find yourself again, a space that thrusts the horizon upwards like a metaphor of the boundaries of heaven, the last horizon of our life in a modern city.
At the same time, opening to the sky, it re-interprets Leon Battista Alberti’s window, a window that is like a threshold, imagined by the great Renaissance architect as the only architectural artifice able to “instil the peacefulness” evoked by the celestial void that, descending from above, takes us back to the imperturbable state of the soul without which overcoming the adversities of life is impossible.
The atmosphere of these “squares of silence” is made more suggestive by a series of permanent site-specific artistic installations that capture the changing effects of light and shadow from dawn to dusk. These installations were created by two important Italian artists (Sauro Cardinali and Nicola Renzi), with whom collaboration began during the initial stage of the project.
Photograph by Massimo Marini
This contribution, strongly linked with architecture, helps to define a new space for silence and meditation within the city.
William Richard Lethaby said that human beings cannot understand the world as a whole. They must first move away from it, and only after having achieved this detachment can they achieve understanding.
In this sense a building can be seen as a model of the world; it represents an order we cannot directly experience in the world, but at the same time it makes perceptible, within the limits of a building, that which exists in the world.
Photograph by Massimo Marini
Project: Andrea Dragoni, with Francesco Pes Collaborators: Andrea Moscetti Castellani, Giorgio Bettelli, Michela Donini, Raul Cambiotti, Antonio Ragnacci, Cristian Cretaro, Matteo Scoccia Client: Comune di Gubbio Site-specific art work: Sauro Cardinali, Nicola Renzi Structural design: Giuseppe Artegiani, Marco Bacchi Plants Design: Italprogetti (Moreno Dorillo, Elvisio Regni) Safety coordination: Claudio Pannacci Director of works: Francesco Pes, Paolo Bottegoni Maquette: Giuseppe Fioroni
News: online home rental brand Airbnb is to replace a set of aluminium chairs at its new San Francisco headquarters after Emeco, the company that makes the original Navy Chair, pointed out that they were fakes.
Original Emeco Navy Chair
Airbnb announced today that it will replace eight chairs after Emeco contacted Dezeen to point out that the chairs were imitations of its patented design.
“With our new office, we have worked hard to create a home for our employees that reflects our company’s culture, values, and brand – including design,” said Airbnb in a statement to Dezeen. “Now that it has been brought to our attention, in this instance we will replace the eight chairs with originals.”
Emeco director of communications Martin Olsson-Prescott emailed Dezeen last week to complain about the fake chairs following our publication of the Airbnb offices, which were designed in-house by the company in homage to rental properties around the world.
Original Emeco Navy Chair
“Unfortunately, we are obliged to make you aware of a knockoff product featured in that piece,” Olsson-Prescott. “Seeing a knockoff chair in a Dezeen featured cool space like the Airbnb office would help validate the false form of a knock-off. And the few people who notice might question both Airbnb’s designer and Dezeen’s selectivity.”
The Navy Chair, originally designed in 1944 for use on US Navy submarines, is one of the most widely copied designs of the last century and Emeco has been active in the courts to protect its intellectual property. Last year Emeco settled a lawsuit against American company Restoration Hardware, which was producing £50 copies of the £300 chair.
“We put a lot of efforts and investment into fighting knock-offs,” said Olsson-Prescott, who told Dezeen readers what to look out for when searching for an original Navy Chair.
“There are many small details that distinguish a genuine Emeco Navy chair from a knockoff,” he said. “In this case the biggest giveaway is the shape of the back, which is very rounded. And the spacing between the three bars in the back.”
Emeco’s Navy Chairs are created from recycled aluminium using a 77-step process and are guaranteed for 150 years.
In a video interview with Dezeen last year, Emeco CEO Gregg Buchbinder said his company was working with leading designers to create ever-more sophisticated products in order to deter copying. “The more difficult it is, the more difficult it is for people to knock it off,” Buchbinder said.
News: online design retailer Fab has changed its strategy yet again, ending its relationship with external designers and brands across Europe and instead focusing on selling its own custom-designed furniture.
The changes were announced on Fab’s European website today. “We’re transitioning our business in the EU to focus solely on growing our popular custom-designed furniture line,” the site says.
“We have decided to focus our European business on our custom-made furniture, which will give you access to affordable, high-quality, made-to-measure sofas, shelving, tables, and beds, and more,” it adds. “This has been a very successful aspect of Fab’s business in Europe to date, which we will continue to invest in and grow.”
While the US, Canadian and Australian Fab sites will remain the same as before, the European site will now focus on selling own-brand goods.
“While we focus on bringing custom-made, high-quality furniture to customers in the EU, we’re taking a break from selling products made by others in the EU region at this time,” the site explains. “We are still working with designers to develop products that you may eventually see on Fab.”
The move comes less than four months after Fab held its latest Disrupting Design event in London, where it asked young designers to pitch products to be sold on the site.
“I have dozens, if not hundreds, of stories of designers whose lives have changed through selling on Fab,” said Fab co-founder Bradford Shellhammer in an interview with Dezeen at the time. “Designers can make more money than they would at one of these old-school design manufacturing brands licencing their products, because we have an audience.”
Other senior staff, including senior vice president creative Tracy Dorée, have also left the company. Dorée joined Fab after Llustre, the UK flash sales startup she founded, was bought by the American site in June 2012, just ten weeks after Llustre’s launch.
The latest move comes after a traumatic last year for the company that was once valued at over $1 billion, but which has seen its value and audience decline.
Shellhammer, Fab’s chief design officer, stepped down from his role at the company in November last year, just after the company laid off 101 employees – around 20% of its workforce.
In July it had announced it was moving away from its earlier reliance on “flash” sales towards being a more traditional retailer, selling products designed and made by a wide range of suppliers.
Around the same time, around 100 employees at its European headquarters in Berlin were laid off and operations centralised in New York.
In April last year, Fab announced it would be manufacturing its own products for the first time and bought German custom-made furniture website MassivKonzept, which is thought to be the inspiration behind its latest move into customised products.
The announcement published on Fab today explains how the new European site will work: “[It] means that our customers in the EU will have access to affordable, high-quality, made-to-measure furniture at their fingertips. You can configure our shelving, table, and seating systems online to create quality furniture that meets your needs perfectly.
“You choose the dimensions, colour and materials, and our skilled cabinetmakers will make your furniture and turn your designs into a happy reality.”
Opinion: in her first column for Dezeen, critic Alexandra Lange argues that architects are misusing platforms like Twitter and Tumblr. “Architects need to start thinking of social media as the first draft of history,” she writes.
It’s easy to make fun of Bjarke Ingels on Instagram. Selfie, LEGO selfie, girlfriend (I hope), Gaga, monograph, fog, fox socks. His Instagram has a lot to do with the architecture of self-promotion, but little to do with actual building. The same goes for many architects’ Twitter feeds: lecture, lecture, award, positive review, lecture. You could say that’s just business today. But social media can do more for architecture than showcase pretty faces and soundbites. Architects need to start thinking of social media as the first draft of history.
There’s an unofficial rule of thumb that you should only tweet about yourself 30 percent of the time. That’s a rule many architects break over and over again. They treat Twitter and Instagram as extensions of their marketing strategy, another way to let people know where their partners are speaking, that their projects are being built, and that the critics like them. Happy happy happy. Busy busy busy. Me me me. In real life, most architects aren’t quite as monomaniacal as their feeds. (There are exceptions.) They read reviews written about others. They look at buildings built by others. Heck, they even spend some time not making architecture. That balance, between the high and the low, the specific and the general, the obvious and the obscure makes life, not to mention design, much more interesting.
That unselfish reading, writing, seeing and drawing form part of the larger cloud of association that, one day, critics will use to assess and locate the architecture of today. A more flexible, critical and conversational use of social media could suggest interpretations before the concrete is dry. As an example, consider Philip Johnson, perhaps the most networked architect of his day. Philip Johnson would have been really good at social media. He understood, better than most, that interest is created by association. That was the principle of his salons, drawing the latest and greatest from a variety of cultural realms. Those young artists and architects helped him stay young and current, he helped them by offering literal or metaphorical institutional support.
Isn’t that how these platforms work too? I look better when I spread the word about everyone’s good work, not just my own. And seeing others’ projects gives me new ideas. Johnson was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, but he was also a “curator” in contemporary parlance, collecting and distributing people and objects and styles.
That’s why his physical library at his Glass House in New Canaan, CT remains of interest: the shelves reveal what he thought worth reading and keeping. Outside, its form reveals the same: the work of architect Michael Graves, promoted and digested. Even earlier, in the September 1950 issue of Architectural Review, Johnson set out the inspirations – possibly decoys – for that same Glass House. There’s Mies, of course, but there are also the less expected references to Suprematist painter Kasimir Malevich and eighteenth century architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux. There’s an image showing the Brick House, the almost windowless box set behind the Glass House where he actually slept, a building often eliminated from later photography of the site. There are many readings of this combination of text and images, few of them straightforward. But I’ll take false fronts and red herrings over pure self-promotion any day. Trails of breadcrumbs like this are catnip for critics then and now. Johnson used a prestigious journal to try out his version of the Glass House genealogy. You architects could be doing this every day.
Instagram is popularly characterised as a more perfect version of everyday life: the artfully mismatched tablescape, the colour-balanced Christmas tree, the accessorised child. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We get enough better-than-reality images of buildings on sites like Dezeen. I’ve started Instagramming my visits to exhibitions and buildings, as a way of sharing the first cut, taking visual notes, and focusing on details and moments that didn’t make the press packet. We so often see the same images of a building, over and over. What about the rest of it? My unprofessional photographs pick up on different things. At Herzog & de Meuron’s Parrish Art Museum, for example, I snapped the sign required to point you to the “Main Entrance.” And the ten-foot, blackened, windowless doors that could flatten a five-year-old. These images can be critical in a different way – fleeter, funnier, like popcorn – from the endangered building review. Could architects point out their own mistakes? Or – with love, of course – those of their colleagues? Of their heroes?
At a higher artistic level, there’s the example of the Instagram of architectural photographer Iwan Baan. His Instagram reveals that he has seen more contemporary architecture (and more of it from helicopters) than anyone. I find something aggrandising, even aggressive, about the relentlessness of his travel and the harsh aerial views. There’s also something humanising about his Instagram as a series of outtakes, capturing the surround for the more perfect images that end up on the websites of the architects. We see the faces of people, the buildings imperfectly lit or weathered. The heroic and the ordinary combine in this extra work, and will ultimately contribute to the way we look at the official pictures too. It would be even better if the architects were right there beside him, taking pictures of what else they see. I know architects make design pilgrimages. Why not take us there?
It isn’t just stolen moments that social media can capture. Tumblr is an ideal platform for context, before, during and after the run of construction. On a campus project, your building may be in dialogue not only with its neighbours and a predecessor, but with the whole history of development and style across campus. A project-specific Tumblr could allow an architect to show a wider audience that they recognise that legacy. That they are able to see a site as more than a blank slate or frame for their contribution. Client and community engagement doesn’t need to be limited to a specific forum. Why not share images of favourite or inspirational details? Moments of conflict? The materials palette of the campus? On a new building at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, I started snapping pictures of all the adjacent modern and postmodern buildings’ backsides, newly prominent now that a plaza has replaced a parking lot. Who but an architect would document those?
The diversity of purpose, the cloud of connections that work so well on Twitter is all wrong on Tumblr. There, you need to specialise, hone your theme to a single word. How else could Fuck Yeah Brutalism have 100,000 followers? Are you obsessed with the architecture of the past? With a particular designer? A place? An ingredient of whatever kind? How better to get that monkey off your back than by creating a trove of the best, most suggestive imagery. Who knew that many people liked Brutalism? As a side benefit, here’s a handy way to mobilise the opposition the next time someone talks about tearing down, say, Government Center.
Architects might also consider the archival angle. Graduate students start Tumblrs for their dissertation research, creating a daily log of their best discoveries. Museums and archives have launched Tumblrs to showcase their collections, or to do a deep dive into a particular archive that is in the process of being digitised. I’m fascinated by the Documenting Modern Living project at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, which shows the process of digitising the photographs, fabric samples, architectural drawings and order forms that went in to making Eero Saarinen and Alexander Girard’s Miller House, commissioned in 1953. Making such a house, and maintaining such a house, well documented. Designers of a certain age might think about doing something similar with their own files, again starting the wheels of interpretation and reflection.
A book like The Images of Architects, for which Valerio Olgiati asked famous architects to send him images important to their work, performs a similar task. But there’s something so static, so precious about this presentation. Don’t wait to be maestri or maestrae. Don’t wait to be asked. Start showing what you’re made of now.
“The premise is simple and elegant: Use the Internet to a) spread the word to a diverse, international art audience about what could be lost if any sale goes forward; b) suggest that readers expand the process by posting their own links and images to social media sites such as Twitter and Instagram; and c) generate support for the Detroit Institute of Arts by asking readers to click through and buy a museum membership (an individual membership starts at $65).”
#DayDetroit was quite beautiful, waking up a wide readership to the contents of the DIA, and generating conversation about the relationships of cities to their art. But it also got me thinking: It’s not only Detroit’s art assets that are being dispersed and destroyed, it’s the architecture too. There’s been a valuable discussion of “ruin porn”, and the aestheticising of structures only after they are too late to save. But what about Detroit’s incredible architecture that’s still standing? Why haven’t we had, over the past five years, any number of #DayDetroits for architecture, where a collective of architects point out the irreplaceable built assets that are also disappearing?
Social media can make criticism, interpretation, dialogue and history part of daily life. Don’t leave it to the critics.
Architects sometimes forget what other people don’t know – or forget to share the positive assets of the past before, during and after they are threatened. Social media collects in real time. You can hashtag your firm. You can collate your campus work. You can geolocate your project. You can tip your hat to a colleague. You can tell us what you’re reading. In doing so architects contribute to a broader dialogue about what makes a good experience. What social media can do for architects is make criticism, interpretation, dialogue and history part of daily life. Don’t leave it to the critics. Don’t farm it out to your communications staff. That’s boring. Surely you don’t want to be boring? I’d be surprised if one social media platform or another weren’t part of most designers’ daily practice (at least those under 50). Let the rest of us in, so it doesn’t take bankruptcy, demolition or obituary to get people talking about architecture.
News:Google has joined up with automotive manufacturers including Honda, Audi, Hyundai and General Motors to integrate its Android smartphone operating system into cars.
The news could bring Google into fresh conflict with Apple, which is understood to be working on similar plans and hopes to make its iOS operating system the industry standard.
They claim the system’s openness, customisation and scale will allow carmakers to easily incorporate cutting-edge technology, but will also create opportunities for developers to create new experiences for drivers and passengers.
“The car is the ultimate mobile computer,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive officer of NVIDIA. “With onboard supercomputing chips, futuristic cars of our dreams will no longer be science fiction. The OAA will enable the car industry to bring these amazing cars to market faster.”
Google will bring Android apps to car dashboards later this year
“They’re working with all the world’s major automotive companies to bring iOS to cars,” he told Dezeen. “That could be a huge deal for them because that’s where most people listen to music.”
The first vehicle equipped with Google’s Android technology is due to roll off the production line later this year, bringing the 700,000 existing Android apps to the dashboard. Open Automotive Alliance is inviting more carmakers to join in the hope that Android will become the dominant platform for in-car computing.
“Millions of people are already familiar with Android and use it every day,” said Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Android, Chrome and Apps at Google. “The expansion of the Android platform into automotive will allow our industry partners to more easily integrate mobile technology into cars and offer drivers a familiar, seamless experience so they can focus on the road.
A facade of translucent plastic pillows can be pumped up to alter lighting and temperature inside this domed tropical greenhouse in Aarhus by Danish firm C. F. Møller (+ slideshow).
C. F. Møller worked with membrane facade specialist formTL to create the ETFE plastic facade of the new Tropical House, located at the Aarhus botanical gardens. This provides an energy-efficient envelope with a quilted texture around the 18-metre-high structure.
The light and heat conditions within the building can be adapted by increasing or decreasing the air pressure inside the pillows, which then changes the translucence of the facade.
A grid of ten steel arches gives the greenhouse its curved shape, designed to create a large interior space using the lowest possible surface area.
“The domed shape and the building’s orientation in relation to the points of the compass have been chosen because this precise format gives the smallest surface area coupled with the largest volume, as well as the best possible sunlight incidence in winter, and the least possible in summer,” said the architects.
An assortment of tropical plants, trees and flowers fills the interior of the greenhouse. A pond is located at the centre of the space, while an elevated platform allows visitors to climb up above the treetops.
The building was constructed to replace an existing hothouse built by the same architects in 1969. This structure was renovated as part of the project and will now be used to house a botanical knowledge centre.
Heated conservatory at the Botanical Gardens, Aarhus
Transparent roofing made of ETFE foil cushions with an interior pneumatic shading system planned by formTL and C. F. Møller Architekten.
The new tropical conservatory at the Botanical Gardens in Aarhus is like a drop of dew in its green surroundings. Its transparent dome set on an oval base extends the existing greenhouse built in 1969. A special feature of this structure is that is allows for the greatest interior volume with the lowest possible surface area, leading to high energy efficiency.
The support structure consists of 10 steel arches, which fan out around a longitudinal and a transverse axis, creating a net of rectangles of varying sizes. formTL planned and designed a cover for these arches made mainly of double-layered ETFE cushions, which are affixed with biaxially bent profiles due to their complex structure.
On the south-facing side, the cushions used were made with three layers, two of which were printed. Through changes in pressure, the relative positions of these printed foils can be adjusted. This can reduce or increase, as desired, the translucence of the cushions, changing the light and heat input of the building.
Structural diagram – roof plan
Dimensions
Cushion surface area: 1,800 m² Base area: 1,145 m2
• Rise of arches up to 17.5 m • Span of arches up to 41 m
Structural diagram – elevation one
Materials
• Nowofol ETFE foil, strengths of 150 µm and 250 µm • Biaxially bent cushion edge profiles made of aluminium
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
